Utilizing Smart Textiles-Enabled Sensorized Toy and Playful Interactions for Assessment of Psychomotor Development on Children

• Main Authors: Mario Vega-Barbas, Iván Pau, Javier Ferreira, Evelyn Lebis, Fernando Seoane
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2015-01-01
• Series: Journal of Sensors
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/898047

Emerging pervasive technologies like smart textiles make it possible to develop new and more accessible healthcare services for patients independently of their location or time. However, none of these new e-health solutions guarantee a complete user acceptance, especially in cases requiring extensive interaction between the user and the solution. So far, researchers have focused their efforts on new interactions techniques to improve the perception of privacy and confidence of the people using e-health services. In this way, the use of smart everyday objects arises as an interesting approach to facilitate the required interaction and increase user acceptance. Such Smart Daily Objects together with smart textiles provide researchers with a novel way to introduce sophisticated sensor technology in the daily life of people. This work presents a sensorized smart toy for assessment of psychomotor development in early childhood. The aim of this work is to design, develop, and evaluate the usability and playfulness of a smart textile-enabled sensorized toy that facilitates the user engagement in a personalized monitoring healthcare activity. To achieve this objective the monitoring is based on a smart textile sensorized toy as catalyzer of acceptance and multimodal sensing sources to monitor psychomotor development activities during playtime.